


sorry for not winning you an arcade ring

by electrumqueen



Series: if this is the long haul [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Marvel Cinematic Universe Fusion, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Post-Soldier Enhancement Program | SEP (Overwatch), Pre-Slash, bodily autonomy (and the lack thereof), mentioned James "Bucky" Barnes - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29692398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electrumqueen/pseuds/electrumqueen
Summary: When SEP finally folded, Gabriel and Jack were the only ones left with the clearance to strip the facility. They got two weeks out of the UN, Adawe extracting oaths that their loan to the US government would under no circumstances run any longer. They left Zurich on a commercial flight to New York; from there hopped a military shuttle out to Colorado Springs.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes & Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Series: if this is the long haul [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2184618
Kudos: 2





	sorry for not winning you an arcade ring

**Author's Note:**

> the fusion is like, pretty minor - this is overwatch canon (kind of), not mcu! all songs on evermore are about bucky barnes, but coney island specifically is extremely about bucky barnes.

When SEP finally folded, Gabriel and Jack were the only ones left with the clearance to strip the facility. They got two weeks out of the UN, Adawe extracting oaths that their loan to the US government would under no circumstances run any longer. They left Zurich on a commercial flight to New York; from there hopped a military shuttle out to Colorado Springs. 

Jack fell asleep on Gabriel's shoulder, getting blond hair in Gabriel's nose and drooling on his jacket. Gabriel did paperwork and texted Vincent from the secure phone to say they'd likely be able to see him at the end of the next week. It would be a nice surprise for Jack and God knew Jack's relationship could use the oxygen. It wouldn't be a hardship for Gabriel, either. He liked Vincent, and Vincent always brought friends with him who liked the look of Gabriel, which was flattering and also kind of him. 

In retrospect it was probably Gabriel's fault for thinking of it as a vacation. They'd had a hard few weeks - taken out three omniums back to back, when even one was exhausting and would take a full complement of soldiers if they were unenhanced. The idea of spending two weeks sifting through lab equipment and paperwork sounded like a fucking dream. 

In Denver they were shown to quarters on the main base, the adjoining kind given out to visiting generals, and given the use of a little hovercar that would take them out to SEP facilities proper. 

"Always was a bitch to get around," Gabriel said, reminiscing. He'd been the one to teach Jack the long hike around the sensor bots, which had functioned as its own internal test to see if you really could hack it in SEP. He'd had his doubts about Jack but pretty boy had passed with flying colours. Later, drunk, he'd confessed to Gabriel that he knew what they all knew: people like them could not afford to mindlessly follow orders. Not with what they had allowed to be done to them. 

Jack shot him a knowing look. "You want to go back to that bar."

"I really do," Gabriel said. "I can wait until we've done some work first, though. You think they'll let us have a picnic there?" 

"Jesus, Gabriel," Jack said, but he was pinking up a little, picking up what Gabriel was putting down: that place had no power over them, not anymore.

Not when they scanned in through those familiar awful doors, stepped into the familiar creaking elevator and let it take them down into the bowels of the earth.

"Same old same old," Jack said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his civilian jeans: there was no point being here in uniform, the facility had been mothballed for months. It would be better, in fact, if they had plausible deniability. A vacation for two good American soldiers. 

It looked the same. Concrete walls, concrete floors; everything easy to wipe down and sanitize, lit with panels of fluorescent lighting along the ceiling and floors that burst into life when their motion was detected. 

They agreed to start with the filing cabinets. A lot of it was so top secret it was paper only, and needed to be manually reviewed before being either shredded or archived. And that was on the first floor, so they wouldn't have to go down deep. 

It almost did feel like a vacation. They had brought sandwiches from the mess and a huge flask of lemonade, eating on a tarp spread out on the lab floor with classified paperwork spread out around them. The lab had the most empty floor space, allowing for the papers to pile in messy stacks as they were read and put aside. 

"Waste of two god damn super soldiers," Gabriel said, reading over the initial test results for his first week roommate. "No way they couldn't bump up some pencil pusher's classifications for a weekend? It's a dead program. This is why Adawe thinks they're trying to fuck her. One third of goddamn Overwatch reading ten year old documents because the US military can't get its thumb out of its ass."

"Mm," Jack said, frowning into his sandwich. "Nice to have a break, though." He sighed. "You talk to Ana? She hates the subs Adawe got. Says they're sloppy."

"She just needs time to break 'em in," Gabriel said. "Give her three days."

"Yeah, yeah." Jack licked delicately at the base of his thumb. "Can you believe they thought _Silverman_ would come out on top? Christ."

Gabriel snorted. "On top of the shitter," he said. "What a way to go. Fuck, that was a bad set of shots."

They fell into easy reminiscence, sorting through personnel file after personnel file and boxing them up to be stored somewhere very safe. Jack's wasn't there and neither was Gabriel's: they were the only two whose files would not bear the red rubber stamp _Deceased._ Gabriel felt himself soften, almost grateful: there really was nobody left to know the truth of what had happened here, and it felt like something they could give to the dead, at least once. A wake of sorts, for people whose families would only ever know that they had been lost in the line of duty. 

Finally Jack got up and stretched his arms over his head. "You wanna go for a walk?"

"Sure."

Jack seemed to know where he wanted to go so Gabriel did as he'd learned to on mission after mission, tucking himself into the wake of Jack's steps. The halls seemed both bigger and smaller than they had when Gabriel had lived here. It was strange to see it so empty, only the two of them in a base that had housed hundreds. 

They turned down a hall and into another elevator; Jack held out his hand for the pass Gabriel had been given and Gabriel, bemused, dug it out of his pocket and put it into Jack's palm. It was clear now that this was not just a walk. 

The elevator took them down for a long time. Jack didn't speak: Gabriel let his hand go to the holster at his hip. Finally the doors slid open, revealing yet another expanse of grey concrete wall. 

Jack took a step forward and then for the first time hesitated, turning back to look at Gabriel. His eyes gleamed in the harsh light; Gabriel was reminded that they had met for the first time in a hallway like this. Jack had been young and lean, but the eyes had been the same, looking at Gabriel like they looked through time. He'd known them at once. Known he wanted this man to have his back. More of soldiering was instinct than they talked about, and Gabriel's had not yet steered him wrong. 

Gabriel nodded. _Got your six, Jackie._

Jack nodded back, relief pouring down through his shoulders. He took off again and again Gabriel followed. 

He stopped, finally, in front of a door. Out came Gabriel's pass again, and the door slid open. 

Gabriel pulled his gun, safety off. The click would be enough for Jack to know, to be reassured, as Jack had reassured Gabriel in the same way a hundred times himself. 

The room whirred to life. Lights on a console were the first, then the ceiling and the floor. They were in a viewing room, separated from another by a pane of glass, which Gabriel knew without checking would be plastiglass, impenetrable by anything short of a tank driving through it. In their room there was a whole bank of servers and a big console. In the glass room there was a cryotube and a metal folding chair, folded up against the wall. 

Gabriel took the pass from Jack, swiped it through the console and when prompted entered the override code he'd been given - obsolete anywhere but here, they'd told him. Here it would work on anything. 

_Asset management,_ the console prompted. It showed him a scan of a man's body, left arm lit up in contrast to the rest of it. 

"Metal arm," Jack offered. 

Gabriel grunted in affirmation. He scanned the information available, something that would show up for brass with clearance. None of them left anymore; it was an old program, abandoned, or else Jack and Gabriel wouldn't be here. 

"Asset," Gabriel said. Sounded it out. He put the safety back on but kept the gun in his hand. "They love their euphemisms."

_Soviet origin. Hydra acquisition. Transferred to SEP jurisdiction for augmentation development. Remains available to other departments._

"Russian?" Gabriel said. "Shit, we're gonna have to give him back." He was out of practice: he thought like Adawe, like the UN. More likely they'd have to dispose of him. Find whatever agency wanted him and have him moved. 

"He's not Russian," Jack said. 

Jack had always been the faster reader. Gabriel cued the data to the nearest tablet and picked it up, swiping through swiftly. "Oh, they just found him somewhere, too."

"Finders keepers," Jack offered, wry. "Hydra's ours."

"They just kept him frozen in here, huh," Gabriel said. "That's one way of keeping costs down." A list of the asset's augmentation and test scoring caught his eye. "Shit, these are SEP level results. Soviet origin? Really?" 

"Lower than ours," Jack said. "Significantly higher than baseline, but not quite us."

"I wonder if any of our guys are somewhere like this," Gabriel said, sourly. He really had gotten soft working for Overwatch. Thought of himself as a person and everything. 

"Don't," Jack said. He shook his head. "We'll look. That's what we're here for."

"Is it?" Gabriel asked. He looked back down at the file. "Conditioning phrases. Interesting." Interesting meant nauseating. But Jack knew. 

Jack said, "Glad we didn't get any of those."

"How long's he been here? Poor fucking bastard." Gabriel handed the file off to Jack and swiped the pass to open the door to the glass room, going in for a closer look. 

It looked like any 40s-model cryopod: a bulky metal column with a frosted over little window showing the face inside. A man's face, white, with dark hair. Maybe mid to late twenties at a guess, though it was hard to tell. That would put him at Jack's age, maybe a little younger. 

"Hundred odd years," Jack said. He didn't look down at the file, just said it like he knew it. His voice was hollow, like it got giving a bad report. "Give or take a couple decades. Not all of it with us, obviously."

Displeasure rolled up Gabriel's spine, prickling the back of his neck. He hated not having all the information, and Jack fucking knew it. "How do you know all this?" 

"I handled him. A couple times. There's a, uh, a physical profile. Hair colour, height, build. He'll go under for anyone, the conditioning's good, but it's easier - he's more responsive - if you tell him you're Steve."

Gabriel did not allow himself to flinch. Jack was violating classification orders to tell him; at the very least he ought to respect it. 

"Steve Rogers," Jack said, eyes going distant. "They made me pretend I was Captain America. They were friends." He folded his hands behind his back in parade rest, to which he often reverted when he felt unsure or uncomfortable. He'd gone to military school as a child and his responses were even more intuitive than Gabriel's, though Gabriel had spent his entire adult life in uniform. 

Gabriel held himself very still, watching Jack do the same. He studied that careful, handsome face: it really had not ever occurred to him that they might have put Jack on missions like that. It was so obviously counter to his skill set, it would be a waste. And, well. Gabriel himself should have been able to tell. Jack had been his rookie. Jack had been - Jack was - his teammate. His partner.

Jack ground his teeth. "Fuck, Gabe, will you just say something?" 

"That's Strike Commander," Gabriel said, calmly. "I'm not Vincent, Morrison, don't make that mistake again."

Jack shook his head. "Sorry, Sir. Strike Commander. I just - really hated doing it."

It was written all over his face. Jack was almost never expressive: he was great with the media, but that was as much a mask as the stone jaw he put on in the field. Now, with Gabriel, in the bowels of the SEP facility, he looked _distraught._

Gabriel nodded. "Nobody else has clearance for this?" 

"No, sir. Not even you. I'm pretty sure telling you would count as treason, actually, since we're UN property." 

"Good thing I saw it with my own eyes, then."

Jack’s mouth grimaced, a bare sliver of a smirk that did not meet his eyes. "Technically they're not yours, sir. Patented US army biotech."

It had been the refrain in the barracks here, the response to any and everything. The only way to think about it was to make it a joke. Nothing that they were belonged to them. 

"Hey," Gabriel said, allowing his voice to soften because it was Jack. "You were following orders."

"I fucking shouldn't have," Jack said. Maybe the UN had gotten to him, too. He'd always been the idealist of the two of them. "The first time - I should have let them take me out in a body bag."

Something pulsed hot in Gabriel's belly, furious at the idea of it, the mention. The thing that had carried Jack on Gabriel's shoulders through a battlefield, one hand on Jack the other holding his own guts in. "Fuck no," he snarled. "What would that do for this poor bastard? Blonds are a dime a dozen, Jackie. They'd have pulled someone else." 

Jack visibly wilted. "You worked black ops, before. You know -" 

"I know," Gabriel said. "I can guess. And this miserable fucker didn't sign up for any of it." You didn't really sign up for black ops. You couldn't. You signed up for what you thought it was, and you were wrong. Even that was something more than this guy had gotten. 

"They didn't tell me his name," Jack said. "But I could figure it out. I used to have a Cap poster on my wall."

Only Jack would look like that and be fascinated by an obscure figure in World War Two history. Must have been a real confusing personality back in high school in Indiana. 

"What did Vincent think about that?" 

Jack shrugged, too distracted to take it in the lightness with which it was intended. "Made me a shield, actually. It was nice."

"Never let him go," Gabriel said. 

"I'm not planning to," Jack said. That did perk him up a little, snap him out of the fugue state. He shook his head. "James Buchanan Barnes," he said, softly. "Only Howling Commando whose body was unaccounted for."

Gabriel did, in fact, know his military history. He didn't go much in for superheroics - he'd take Odysseus over Achilles any day - but it had been a hell of a story. "And now it's accounted for."

"Gabe-" Jack started. He shut his mouth, tried valiantly to keep it that way, and gave up. "He's not an asset. He's a person."

"Would he tell you that if we woke him up?" Gabriel asked. "Didn't think so."

Jack let out a low, furious, breath, but Gabriel let it slide. Jack had already been reminded of chain of command. Gabriel had told him he was not in charge here, humiliated him a little so it would sink in. It would, because Jack trusted Gabriel on a level deeper than conscious thought allowed. You had to, to let someone have your back the way Gabriel had Jack's.

"I'm not going to call it in," Gabriel said, raising his palm to forestall Jack's insubordination. "We'll figure it out. But this is my responsibility, not yours, all right?" 

Jack straight out glared for a minute, and then he got it, what Gabriel was saying: _it's okay, it's not your fault, whatever happens, it's on me._ "Strike Commander," he said. 

"Thank you," Gabriel said, quirking the corner of his mouth the way Ana had told him made him look like a particularly irritating son of a bitch. "Leave the tablet here for now. We have two weeks, remember?" 

Jack nodded, training taking over. "Yes, sir." 

It was Gabriel's turn to lead them out. He felt the weight of Jack's gaze on his shoulder but he was used to it, by now. It was almost reassuring. 

They got all the way up, back to the lab, but they were both too rattled for any work; technically this day was a travel day, so leaving early wouldn't affect the timeline they'd drawn out for themselves in Zurich, after getting the assignment. 

Jack made Gabriel call it, maybe in revenge for pulling rank on him down there. Jack would not admit to that kind of sulk, but Ana and Reinhardt agreed with Gabriel that he pulled them often when not getting his own way. 

Either way Gabriel probably deserved it, so he just curled his hand around Jack's wrist and said, "Come on. It's been a long day."

Jack looked up at him through those impossible eyelashes. "All right," he said, letting himself be pulled to his feet.

He followed right on Gabriel's heels, but for once didn't fight Gabriel for the hovercar keys, just settled into the passenger seat and looked at him, like there was something in Gabriel's face he couldn't quite figure out. 

Gabriel wanted to say, _listen, after ten years, there's nothing you don't know about me, Morrison,_ but he kept his mouth shut and drove them to base, and then out again to the little bar they'd always gone to when they were sneaking out of SEP. 

The dartboard had not been replaced, something Gabriel found startlingly affecting. He could see the nicks and scrapes he and his cohort had caused; they hadn't come out until they'd known their own strength, really known it, but even an unenhanced human could knock a chip out of a dartboard when drinking. 

They ordered bar food and beer and settled into the corner table that had been Gabriel's favourite, leaning onto elbows to speak to each other over the creaking table. 

Even this was strategy. It had come back to both of them being in there and they fell into it automatically, remembering a time they had lived under an intimate siege. 

They couldn't talk about anything classified here, obviously. They were instantly recognizable at a military bar in a military town, but they had grown up here so the recognition did not feel so heavy. 

More importantly, what they said would not be monitored the way it was in the base. It would melt into the chatter unless someone had reason to look for it. There was no reason to be suspicious of two soldiers who had not been on leave in what felt like a year sitting down to eat some waffle fries and drink some beer. 

"Gabe," Jack said, those big eyes so clear and so miserable. "If I ever - god forbid - if I ever end up like that, and you see me - just put a bullet in me. All right?"

Gabriel said, "You won't end up like that, Jackie. I won't let you."

"I know. Please."

"All right," he said. He knew he was lying as he said it. As long as there was anything left of Jack he would defend it to his own death. If there was any chance Jack could be saved Gabriel would preserve it. He was selfish, in that way. He had no doubt that if all that was left of Jack was a head in a jar he would carry it around with him until a new omnic body could be built. "I promise."

Jack closed his eyes and opened them. "I want to take him home with us."

"Christ," Gabriel said. 

Jack clenched his jaw, the same kind of stubborn he got before a run inside an omnium that would leave any lesser human in pieces on the floor. "He's ours," he said. "We wouldn't be here without him. He was the first one."

"The second," Gabriel countered, thinking of the Captain America that Jack had pretended to be. The first supersoldier, shot down over the ocean.

"How are we any different from him? They own us too," Jack whispered. His voice broke. But he did not look away from Gabriel; he did not let go of Gabriel's eyes. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> "steve"-as-bucky-handler the most devastating content from the most devastating fic: [ shoeless joe and the sunshine kid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2414678).


End file.
